Canada is beautiful - the photo above shows the stunning mountain ranges that greeted me as I landed in Vancouver - and also the setting of a film I'll probably never get out of my head, Into The Wild. I was in Canada (Calgary, Alberta) to give a presentation about the behavioural ecology of Japanese insect collection and consumption (at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists). Here are the first few slides of my presentation:

…& I'll try and post the rest on the Research page of this site.

I saw a lot of very inspiring presentations at the conference, especially those with new data on insectivory in chimpanzees, and on the nature of human social networks; I was also given the opportunity to introduce some people to Japanese insect foods (general consensus = delicious. No kidding. Although the majority of 'tasters' work with wild primates, so they were perhaps not the most representative sample.)

And now, back in Japan, I have just come back from a visit to the Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, where I was able to catch up with (old) friends and (new) research, and to see the Japan Monkey Center, a zoo with 68 primate species - more than any other institution in the world. The centre has a lot of space -

...And, there are areas where you can literally walk alongside the primates, for example these squirrel monkeys, which live on an island in the park:

I like this photo because the two monkeys in the middle were fighting ferociously at the time, and I think it kind of captures the moment. But here are a few more (the top two are squirrel monkeys, the bottom left is a Siamang and the bottom right is a Japanese macaque from Yakushima):

And finally, I wanted to share some very good music I discovered while in Calgary, by a band called Plants and Animals - click here to listen! Canadian beer is also pretty good, for the record :)

Growing up in Oxford, I think I would answer this question with the following: Elderflower, nettles, dandelions, blackberries, wild strawberries, walnuts, chestnuts (do these even count?), and perhaps hawthorn and crabapples, although I wouldn't know where to start looking.

A quick google search tells me that a few other plants I have heard of are gathered from the wild. These can separated into three categories of ignorance as follows... 1. Plants I associate with specialist delis and middle class luxuries; I had no idea these were things one could find in the UK free of charge: Sorrel, comfrey. 2. One plant I didn't think could be grown in the UK, let alone in the wild:Plantain. 3. Trees that I can recognise but have never heard of being used as food: Birch, ash.

That gives me 11 known edible species (of which 7 I could collect with confidence) and 3 species I could recognise but didn't know were edible. And I have never actually seen any of these for sale in a shop.

However, here in Japan, many of the people I meet in the countryside can reel off many, many edible wild plant names, far exceeding the numbers cited above, and they continue to collect them by default each year. Far more than my 9 species.. For example, Japanese Wikipedia gives me 42 'common' species, a research article detailing the species found within a single university campus has descriptions and photos of 60 species, and the same article references a text that will apparently yield descriptions of over 1300 species growing in the Japanese wilderness. Also, a recent trip to a shop ('Green farm', in Ina city) in Nagano prefecture even gave me the opportunity to purchase all sorts of wild plants. Here are some examples:

So, why am I interested in this? Because, like edible insects in many parts of the world, wild vegetables are a source of nutrients that have not been analysed for inclusion in the majority of nutritional composition databases. Therefore they are not recognised by governments, nor by policy makers, and nor are they promoted as either healthy nor unhealthy. Thus, in this world of hyper-advertising and large scale branding, wild plants go unnoticed, under-used, and left to seed in the similarly-under-used fields and woodlands that we might be aware of but rarely use.

Perhaps the incorporation of seasonal wild vegetables, along with edible insects, into the everyday diet of people across the world, would have positive effects on public health - including not only human health, but also that of the environment in which we live, and that of the relationship we have with the environment that surrounds us.

And finally, looking into all of this (mostly as part of preparation for the Oxford Student Global Food Security Conference in May) has left me with another question: Is my ignorance of edible plants representative of people of my generation in the UK? What about my Japanese equivalents - do people in their 20s in contemporary Japan know about the 1300 vegetables they can collect for free from the forests? What about my Zimbabwean friends? These questions have caught my attention, and I'll write more when I find the answers. Meanwhile if you have any edible plant collecting/cooking stories from the recent or distant past, please email me - especially if your memories involve species or practices I've not mentioned here!